I really enjoyed the season with the Weavers faction. That’s the one I played for quite a while, putting together several strong builds and reaching a high Monolith corruption level. The Imprint helped me a lot; I got the bases and unique items I needed fairly often. And I liked that because I felt like I was making progress; if I couldn’t craft an item better than what I had, or if I couldn’t slam LP on a unique item—it didn’t matter—I knew that within the next hour or two I’d get more of those and try again; for me, that pace was ideal. The new change looks like it’s stretching out the gameplay, but what makes you think that I, for example, would want to spend more time on this than before? And why should other people spend more time on this kind of farming? On top of that, you’re adding a new way to ruin an item and render it useless, meaning we’ll need more of them, yet you’re reducing their drop rate—what a brilliant solution))))
Of course, I’m even more curious to see what MG players will think of this—their ability to farm specific items is now minimal
And there are healthier ways to boost player retention in the new season, like adding more content to the game. If all you can manage is to artificially stretch out farming, that’s a reason to think about how much you value the time of the people who play your game
LE already has insane levels of agency and target farmability, way mroe than msot other similar games. Imprits were just the next major thing that trivliazed much of the progression, to the point of entirely skipping certain progression steps.
This has nothing to do with “no fun allowed”, because getting loot handed to you in way too major ways is killing the fun actually for many people.
“minimal” is a strong word, because there are still plethora of system allowing you do target farm and have agency over loot. If oyu really want to target farm, choose CoF instead. after all there should be a difference between MG and CoF and with imprints being the strongest ways of target farming certain items MG essentially had the same access to the strongest target farming possible.
Shame there’s no real progression in LE yet with the lack of end game - I’ll agree with this statement once they have a lot more so for now it’s a head nod haha
I farmed red rings for over 20 hours to get them at 1LP for one of my characters during the Weavers season. What the hell do you think I missed while farming those items for 20 hours?
If imprints are that strong and effective, and in high demand among players, it means the mechanic turned out great, and we should use it as a benchmark when balancing other mechanics.
I don’t know where you think the loot was too easy to get; as I said, I farmed red rings for over 20 hours. I think the mechanics were great—the item acquisition rate was good, neither too fast nor too slow.
I believe the main advantage of LE is that farming is less random. I like LE largely because of this, as well as the fact that trading isn’t necessary—you can get everything just by playing. Weakening the less-random farming = undermining the game’s main advantage
No, it trivializes getting the absolute strongest items in teh game.
You are talkign about 1LP Red Rings… Red Rings are the absolut top of the crotch endgame uniqeus, they are not build enabling, but incredibly powerful. You can farm several oens with LP within the spawn of a few days. That is not healthy for the game and diminishes the “fun” a lot for some people.
I personally only used imprints as “some extra loot on the side” mechancis and never completely focused on it, because it felt stupid. If you hunted more common items than Red Ring with it, it literally shitted out several dozens over a few hours of playtime. I was at a point where I had 20+ Shadow Beacons or 20+ Titan Hearts with 2LP+ after a day of playing. Loot is not exciting with that kind of loot spam.
As my main concern is power creep, I rather think that it is a good thing that EHG studies the numbers et takes action to bring some nerf to mechanisms that they believe are over perfoming.
Which is more valuable: our time or powerful in-game items? I think it doesn’t matter what powerful and rare items are needed to build the best possible setup—assembling everything you need should take a reasonable amount of time.
I didn’t use this mechanic as my main strategy; I used it alongside all the other options for target farming, and it took me 20 hours to get the red rings. I don’t think I would have had more fun or found it more interesting to farm them for even longer. If some people enjoy the fact that they rarely get anything valuable, there should be a separate ultra-hardcore mode for them, where they have to farm for 1,000+ hours just to assemble even the most basic version of the build they’re interested in. If I understand correctly, such a mode would be an incredible source of dopamine for these people…
What is “a reasonable amount of time”, though?
Is 10h of playtime enough? There are people that only have a couple hours a week to play, so it will take them a month to get it. But then those that play 10h a day are done with the game in a single day (aka, D4).
Is 100h of playtime enough? People that only have a couple of hours a week to play will never get it, then, unless the season extends to a full year. And sweatlords will still be done with the game in 10 days.
Ultimately, item grind has to satisfy both the people that have little time to play, by making enough items available that the build will still function, and also satisfy the sweatlords that need something to chase after 100h of playing.
So you end up with easily accessible items that allow you to create the build and then very hard to get ones that will allow you to min-max things.
Ultimately, if the hardest item to get in the game just requires 20h to get, then most people are done with the game in less than a week and leave.
I’m pretty new to the ARPG community. Sure, I played me some Diablo, PoE, and Diablo 3 many many years ago - but my main game is Guild Wars (which I know is not part of this genre) and in Guild Wars you can simply craft max weapons with max weapon mods fairly early on in the game - the chase in that game are skins. This results in a game that is more about the freedom to experiment with as many builds as you want, and also results in the challenges of the game being skill-based rather than grind-based.
I realize it would be extremely radical to implement deterministic crafting like this into an ARPG, but I’m a big fan of having it closer to deterministic than random. Funny thing is, many people have told me LE is the best when it comes to deterministic.
I spent over 100 hours in season 2 specifically trying to farm and craft a 2x T7 exalted relic for my Void Knight to attempt to slam with a well-rolled 2LP Shattered Worlds. I was never able to find one even with imprints. I didn’t want to slam a single T7 into it as I may never ever see a 2LP Shattered Worlds again. And even if I did get the 2x T7 Relic, it could be wasted on a failed slam. I’d prefer not to have to sink that amount of time into a single-item upgrade.
My perspective is to allow more deterministic crafting in order to open up the doors for more freedom in playing different high-level builds and ensuring the challenges in this game are skill-based and not grind-based.
I think this is already a flawed point of view. It is not either or.
Farming powerful items does take time yes, but getting them handed to you too easily devalues that experience a lot. And how much time it should take is very subjective.
I personally really like when there is chase. And arguebly in LE there is not a lot of chase right now, because you can gear your character for 99% of content already very easily, too easily for some people.
“Nerfing” a specific mechanic or way to get certain items is not always a “bad” thing. I am not sure why people, especially in the ARPG community always perceive nerfs as a bad thing. A well placed nerf can smooth out progression and systems. I think the imprint system itself is very cool, but its a bit convoluded to use and very hard to fully optimize if you don’t fully dig into it (and its basically not possible from the ingame information to fully maximize its use cases).
To get back to your intial “Which is more valuable: our time or powerful in-game items?”:
I think powerful items are mroe valueable then our time, as long as there are enough intermediate goals of progression between each step of upgrades that you can.
I don’t mind if the very best items in the game might take dozens, if not hundreds of hours to get. But while chasing them there should be other stepping stones.
But if you apply that to these goals, its not that LE does not have very good and deterministic crafting, but your goals are reaching for the skies. What you are asking for is the absolute top of the top.
Also without knowing how new you are and if you are aware of all of the mechanics involved farming those kind of items. There is more than just imprints. Every 2x T7 Relics can be used for crafting with Runes of Havoc and Ruens of Redemption.
Each of these methods individuall has very low chances, but if oyu combine them and do all of the mparallel you can get results.
I do get that and I agree, but I am not sure if that is a flaw of the game or maybe a flaw of the way you approach this game? We are talkign about a stage of the game, where you char is already fully decked out with the best gear and these “sinle item upgrades” costing dozens upon dozens of hours of grind, that is normal if you reached that point in any game.
They should have tried the imprint nerf with 70% nerf first and NOT have the “much less” affix thing added, next round if it’s still too strong then cut it to 50 - the less affix thing is going to hurt more than the drop rate, betcha
I am absolutely asking for my time grinding to be rewarded with a tangible item and not just a chance of an item. Top of the top would be a max-rolled 4LP 4x T7 Legendary - and yes, I’m even asking for that, too. I would like to have a pathway of reaching top stat items (even if it is hundreds of hours) rather than randomness / luck-based.
You’re absolutely right. I am learning that my approach is not realistic, at least in terms of ARPG gaming. I’m going to have to set limits on how many hours I’m willing to grind for one piece of gear and then consider that character/build finished afterwards; which means I may be locked out of higher-tier content other players will have access to because they either grinded more or got lucky (hence why I prefer skill-based and not grind-based). I realize it could work the other way - I could get lucky. But I’d prefer an even playing field where we can all experience the same content based on our skill.
Well, that last word in your statement might need to be changed to ARPG. As I’ve stated in the original post, Guild Wars doesn’t function this way, and there are many other games that do not. There are plenty of games that are skill-based (take platformers, for example.)
Chase items should be achievements, collections, titles, skins, cosmetics, in-game rewards, etc.
I realize this is completely contrary to ARPG’s method in general, so I don’t expect it, but I would appreciate advancements towards more deterministic item crafting than towards more completely random crapshoots.
I’m probably in the minority here, but I think this is a great game and I’d love to see Last Epoch try something innovative for the ARPG genre in this respect.
You play a game… so getting the most out of the game while you unwind is the most valueable outcome. This is deifferent for everyone. Some people will say playing games is a waste of time and others will say they waste time if they don’t get the best stuff asap. Pick your poison.
What is a reasonal ammount of time? Good players with a lot of time on their hands finish stuff in one day while others never accomplished anything in the year long season we had a while back.
I’m all for a middleground but for some reason unknown to me most games cater to the 1% for PR or whatever while most people quietly play the game and are happy with it most likely. If they were not happy then we would see it I guess.
You can’t make a loot driven game for average Joe sadly because most people with an average skill would be done with it in hours and lose intrest quick. You need stuff to achive. In all my playtime I only found 5 Exsangs while other people found hundrets while I found 5 Slab’s in 2 minutes. RNG is a biatch.
I think LE has one of the more reasonable timeframes if I take a spectrum from D3 beeing “fast” to PoE beeing “slow”.
Then again I don’t see any issues right now to get the gear to setup most builds if you don’t plan something stupid like a build arround a 1 in a billion drop.
That is simply delusional. If you are brand new and not know any better, I can understand that. But these types of items like 3x or 4x T7 exalted or some of the super rare uniques with 3Lp or 4LP are not really obtainable.
Just because something theoretically exists, doesn’t mean you should be able to farm it.
This is just some open ended system that doesn’t do an artifical cut off. With how exalted affixes and esepcially LP works (balanced on a item by item basis) it is natural that there are some items that are practically unobtainable, and that is totally ok. What proper experience in the game will give you, is finding out what is reasonably obtainable with your commintemnt and time investment and the way you play the game.
A certain degree of randomness and unpredictability is what makes loot and crafting exciting. If everything would be to predictable there are no surprise and “wow moments” anymore.
I think most of your feedback is really just you not fully understanding that you are already in the upper echelons of progression. While theoretically there are some more upgrades, these are essentially unobtainable.
While I do agree that I love games innovating and trying something different. It is way to late for LE to do such a major shift. However I do like if they will add mroe cosmetic/collectible rewards later down the line that is tied to achievments/pinnacle content. So that way you have milestones you cna achieve and feel rpoud of that are not necessarily directly related to getting better loot/character power.
(One of my favorit examples was Marvel Heroes, there was a Purple Glowing Eyes cosmetics, which was pretty hard to obtain and if you saw some body in the HUB having that you knew “oh shit they really done a lot of work”)
Your perspective of the game is completely skewed from watching too much youtube/twitch and thinking 3LP uniques slammed with 3 x t7 modifiers is normal, its not
